The Two-Headed Eagle

“And you’re bound by oath to me, and to the child you’ve planted inside me.” She took my hand and placed it on her satin-smooth belly. “There, feel. It’s life in there: a living child who’ll be breathing in a few months and walking not long after that. Why grieve for the dead? There’s simply too many of them: the whole of Europe turned into one vast bone- yard by Franz Joseph and his like. Let all the kings and generals rot, like the millions of young men they’ve sent to moulder into the earth. Come my Maria-Theresien Ritter, forget about Maria Theresa and Franz Joseph and all the dead emperors and dying empires. Long live life! Let’s make love and create a dozen children: it’s the only way people like us can get back at the rotten sods.”

“Liserl, are you quite mad? Have you no respect for the departed, to talk like that? ”

She laughed. “Yes, I think perhaps I am a little crazy now. After what I’ve had to look at these past two years I’m not surprised: all the maimed bodies and damaged minds. Respect for the departed? If we could I’d take you now to Schonbru

In the years since, I must have read or listened to several dozen eye-witness accounts of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph. I am sure that you too will be familiar with the solemn pageantry of that grey November day; the muffled hoofs of the horses; the nodding black plumes on the cata­falque; the thirty-four reigning monarchs following bare-headed behind the hearse as the cortege wound its way along streets lined with stu

“Who seeks to enter? ”

The Court Chamberlain reeling off the Emperor’s name and his fifty or sixty titles. Then the reply:

“We know of none such here. I ask again, who seeks to enter?” “Franz Joseph, a poor servant of God seeking burial.”

“Enter then,” and the doors slowly swinging open to admit the coffin. No, I shall not bother you yet again by giving a detailed account of what happened. I have found that the aforementioned eye-witness ac­counts usually come either from people who were not there at all, or who were tiny children at the time, or who could not possibly have seen more than a small part of the ceremony if they were indeed present. The reports generally disagree on certain major details, while in other particulars they often show unmistakable signs of having been cribbed one from another. In any case, they almost always compress the two funeral processions into one: the cortege along the Mariahilferstrasse from Schonbru

As to the famous traditional exchange outside the crypt, by the way, while I hate to cast doubt upon a cherished legend, I once discussed this in detail with a Polish general, the very soul of veracity, while we were sitting in a shelter near Victoria Station during a prolonged and noisy air-raid one night in 1941. He had actually been within earshot of the crypt door that day, as a young Rittmeister in an Uhlan regiment, and he assured me upon his honour that no such ritual ever took place. He thought that it might once have done, perhaps back in the eighteenth century; but certainly by 1916 it had long since fallen into disuse. As to the thirty-four crowned heads, neither of us had the slightest idea how that total had been calculated. True, the usual mob of small-time German royalty had turned up—probably more for a free meal than anything else—but Kaiser Wilhelm had pleaded other engagements and there was a war on, so in the end only Ferdinand of Bulgaria had appeared for the non-German monarchies.

The other reason for my not wishing to bore you with yet another account of the funeral of the Emperor Franz Joseph is the simple fact that I was not actually present at either part of the ceremony. I had been due to walk in the cortege from Schonbru

As to the interment itself, it was the last day of my leave and my pres­ence had not been requested either in the procession or as a pilot. The weather was fine for Vie

When it was all over, after a quarter of an hour or so when the last tolling had died away, we got up to make our way home while the trams were still ru

I returned to Pola that evening to catch the boat for Lussin. On my way to the Sudbahnhof I had made a detour to a military outfitters on the Graben, then to the Marine Section of the War Ministry on the Zollamt- strasse to collect a small parcel. Before I kissed Elisabeth goodbye on the station platform I had gone into a cloakroom and removed the Fjl rosette from my cap, replacing it with one purchased that afternoon. It was em­broidered in a dubious-looking wartime gold thread and read simply Kl, cipher of our new Emperor Karl the First—or Karl the Last, as people were already calling him. The parcel contained similar rosettes for my brother-officers at Lussin, and also forty or so of the other-ranks version: a disc of black-japa